The pain point we’re addressing is the sheer complexity of enterprise software development. Software, configuration, and organizations are all complex, and all of these are constantly changing. Problems start in one part of the system, but often aren’t visible until later, perhaps elsewhere. Debugging crosses technical, organizational, and temporal boundaries, and critical data can be lost or missed.

Baqbeat solves this problem by creating a rich, explorable timeline of all the changes in the software ecosystem – source code commits, builds, application deployments, database schema changes, and more. The back end collects changes throughout the system and constructs relationships between them. The front end creates an interactive, graphical visualization that invites exploration and intuitive thinking. Not only does Baqbeat help find answers more quickly, it helps formulate better questions.

What is the full launch/release date planned?

We are planning to start a closed beta in late Q3 2013, and go live by the end of 2013.

Who is on the team?

Dave Stagner has nearly two decades of experience in enterprise configuration management and systems programming. He was doing DevOps before DevOps was cool – fascinated with the transition from software under development to production code in an operational environment.

What is the specific technology or combination of technologies is used?

The really interesting technologies in use are the Neo4J graph database for data storage and structure, and the D3 Javascript library for data visualization. Neo4J is great because the data we’re visualizing is about arbitrary relationships, not strict table structure. It would be very awkward to express these things in a typical RDBMS. D3 helps visualize relationships between different types of things, not just variation on similar things, the way tables show data.

We are in the process of patenting the pattern-matching technology at the heart of our design. The value is not just in tracking the data, but enriching it – automatically discovering relationships between seemingly unrelated events, and presenting information based on those relationships rather than types.

What is the size of your market and how will you scale?

Our potential market is very broad. Any organization developing and deploying in-house distributed applications can benefit from our software. And the larger and more complex the project, the more valuable Baqbeat is for them.

What is your revenue model?

Our initial revenue stream will be a monthly/annual SaaS approach, based on the number of components in the customer system – a good measure of complexity. In the future, we may build a more traditional standalone application for in-house use at businesses not interested in SaaS.

What is your greatest strength?

Two related strengths, really. First, we understand the problem space in a very deep way. Baqbeat was inspired by many years of experience in enterprise development. And second, we know our customers extremely well, and those customers have a very difficult problem and the resources to pay for a great solution.

What is your biggest weakness?

As a sole founder, I’m spread thin. I have to do everything. I’m very much looking forward to having the budget to build a team.

What is one resource you could use that would take this to the next level?

Money, of course. Investment capital would accelerate the process. But what we really need for the next level are beta testers – real businesses to try Baqbeat in the real world and give us effective feedback. The beta testers will have a lot of influence on the final shape of the product.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Technology trends come and go, but people remain the same. If you want staying power, don’t focus on technology – focus on solving people’s problems. That’s where the lasting value is.